The Rodman 41 may have looked a fairly innocuous boat when it launched in 2000, but it was a significant step for Rodman.

Unknown at that time in the luxury flybridge market, the Spanish company had a very strong presence in the commercial world building everything from fast offshore patrol boats to passenger catamaran ferries.

The closest it got to the leisure market was a range of sturdy sports fishing boats. Practical they may have been, but glamorous they were not.

A conservatively styled shaftdrive flybridge cruiser, the Rodman 41 slipped into the circa 40ft flybridge market without too much of a splash.

The Rodman 890 Ventura is the first outboard powered boat that the Spanish yard has made for the leisure market.…

£86,400.00

The most potent weapon it had to compete with big name boats like the Princess 40 and Fairline Phantom 41 was its unusual three-cabin layout. At the time only Sealine was able to offer something similar in the size range courtesy of its three cabin 42/5.

The profile of the 41 was raised further in 2005 when Volvo introduced its IPS pod drive system. Rodman adopted this new propulsion concept enthusiastically, creating a completely new hull moulding for IPS versions of the 41 that mirrored the shaft drive boat forward but segued into a completely new aft section designed to make the most of the new pod drive technology.

It made the 41 unique – no one else was offering an aft cockpit three cabin boat with IPS drive and helped Rodman to sell over 300 examples of the 41, firmly establishing the yard as a serious contender in the luxury flybridge sector.

Buoyed by its success, Rodman introduced the Muse range of luxury flybridge boats in 2006, starting with the Muse 54 followed a year later by the 44. Read the full report in the November 2018 edition of MBY.